When you’re a child the summer holidays can seem to last forever, but as we get older six weeks can fly by. To a ten-year-old, a year is only 10% of their life, (making for a slightly more tolerable wait), and to a 20-year-old it is only 5%. On the logarithmic scale, for a 20-year-old…

Why do we feel good about giving to charity when there is no direct benefit to ourselves, and feel bad about cheating the system? Mathematicians may have found an answer to the longstanding puzzle as to why we have evolved to cooperate. Read research

“… equations and symbols aren’t just a thing. They’re a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave”

These stories show that mathematics is able to make us go out of our intuition measure the Earth which seems infinite, see atoms which are invisible or detect an imperceptible variation of shape. And if there is just one thing that you should take home from this talk, it is this: mathematics allows us to…